Cuomo to cut property taxes, not hike income tax

Gov. Andrew Cuomo is promising to cut the highest local property taxes in the nation during the coming election year, using what he says will be a budget surplus.

Cuomo tells public radio’s “Capitol Pressroom” that the state has no future as the highest taxed in the country.

But in the same interview Wednesday, he says he won’t end or ease billions of dollars in temporary income and business taxes, which he’s extended twice. He doesn’t consider those tax increases because they weren’t new taxes.

E.J. McMahon of the Empire Center for Public Policy says the state cost of subsidizing a property tax cut would be roughly equal to the revenue from the temporary tax increases Cuomo promised in 2010 he’d let expire.